Balaram Puli

Role: Senior Big Data Engineer | Site Reliability Engineer|Principal Site Reliability Engineer – AI & Big Data Client Engagements: Dun & Bradstreet (DNB), Tricentis (currently supporting DNB) As a Senior Big Data Engineer and Site Reliability Engineer at Everest Computers, Inc., I collaborated with enterprise clients including DNB and Tricentis to design, implement, and optimize scalable, secure, and high-performance data infrastructure. My role involved cross-functional coordination, infrastructure automation, system tuning, and ensuring high reliability across AWS and GCP environments. Key Responsibilities & Achievements Big Data Engineering • Architected and maintained large-scale Hadoop, Apache Spark, and EMR clusters for high-throughput data processing. • Built and supported real-time and batch ETL pipelines to power analytics and reporting systems. • Managed cloud data lakes using AWS S3, Glue, Redshift, and Athena for scalable querying and storage. Cloud Infrastructure & Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) • Designed and deployed cloud-native infrastructure on AWS and GCP with high availability and resilience. • Automated IaC provisioning using Terraform, CloudFormation, and Ansible. • Built and maintained monitoring systems with Prometheus, Grafana, CloudWatch, and ELK Stack. • Achieved a 35% reduction in system downtime through proactive performance tuning and capacity planning. Security & Compliance • Configured IAM policies, KMS encryption, and Secrets Manager for secure access and key rotation. • Developed automation for incident response, vulnerability scanning, and compliance enforcement. • Implemented Kerberos authentication across Big Data platforms for secure, centralized access control. Collaboration & Process Improvement • Partnered with cross-functional teams to streamline CI/CD pipelines using Jenkins, GitLab, and Docker. • Led technical knowledge-sharing sessions and mentored junior engineers in cloud and big data best practices.

Staff DevOps EngineerApril 16, 2018 – October 1, 2020 At NCR Corporation, I served as a Staff DevOps Engineer, contributing to the development, deployment, and optimization of high-availability applications across cloud platforms like AWS, GCP, and Azure. My role involved enhancing system performance, ensuring data security, and driving automation to streamline operations for SaaS products. Key Contributions: Infrastructure Automation: Designed and implemented CI/CD pipelines using Jenkins, Harness, and Terraform. Automated cluster management and deployment for Big Data applications using Docker, Kubernetes, and Helm. Big Data Engineering: Managed full Hadoop ecosystem, including MapReduce, YARN, Sqoop, Flume, Kafka, Hive, Pig, HBase, Oozie, NiFi, and Spark. Developed standards for security and high availability for Hadoop/Big Data applications. Cloud Platform Management: Maintained and optimized Linux and Windows servers across in-house datacenters and cloud platforms. Provided Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) support, ensuring minimal downtime for mission-critical applications. Collaboration & Innovation: Partnered with developers to design secure, multi-tenant platforms. Created guidelines for infrastructure management, improving system performance and reliability. My time at NCR Corporation provided me with extensive experience in DevOps, Big Data engineering, and cloud infrastructure management, reinforcing my passion for building efficient, secure, and scalable systems.

As a DevOps and Hadoop Platform Engineer at AHM, I supported population health analytics by building and maintaining secure, scalable data infrastructure on AWS. My contributions were critical in deploying healthcare-focused microservices and administering a large-scale Hadoop environment for predictive analytics and risk modeling. Key Responsibilities & Contributions DevOps & Cloud Infrastructure • Deployed and managed microservices-based healthcare applications using Docker, Kubernetes, and OpenShift on AWS. • Developed and maintained CI/CD pipelines using Jenkins, enabling continuous deployment of Java microservices via Helm charts. • Researched and built DevOps automation tools to streamline deployments on Kubernetes clusters. • Diagnosed and resolved production issues in containerized environments on AWS-hosted OpenShift clusters. Big Data Platform Engineering • Administered a Hortonworks HDP 2.5 Hadoop cluster, managing HDFS, YARN, Hive, HBase, Sqoop, Spark, and Ranger. • Implemented Kerberos-based security and integrated with LDAP for secure user authentication across the platform. • Resolved performance issues on long-running Spark and MapReduce jobs and ensured platform stability. • Integrated SAS with the Hadoop ecosystem to support statistical analysis on large-scale health datasets. Infrastructure & Security Enhancements • Configured and managed HAProxy load balancer for efficient service distribution across the HDP cluster. • Ensured compliance with healthcare data security standards through encryption and access control policies.

Role: Hadoop Engineer/Architect Focus: Insurance analytics for Zurich Insurance. Worked on-site in London, United Kingdom, for Zurich Insurance as a Bigdata/Hadoop Engineer and Architect. Focused on insurance analytics, risk modeling, claims forecasting, and building predictive data pipelines using Hadoop, Spark, Kafka, and cloud platforms (AWS, Azure). Key achievements include improving fraud detection by 25% and deploying a shared European Data Lake platform. Role executed under Wipro Technologies, Hyderabad. Achievements: • Developed a shared European Data Lake platform to enhance risk management and underwriting operations. • Built predictive analytics pipelines, reducing fraud detection false positives by 25%. • Streamlined claims processing with real-time monitoring using Kafka and Spark. Skills: • Big Data Ecosystems: Hadoop, Hive, Spark, Kafka • Cloud Platforms: AWS, Azure • Insurance Solutions: Risk Modeling, Claims Forecasting, Underwriting Optimization

Project: Relay System Engineering Services (Relay SES for Blackberry) 1. Maintained global software components for operational systems across multiple regions. 2. Delivered optimized solutions for data security, scalability, and system reliability in high-demand environments. 3. Expertly managed Linux systems, ensuring uptime, system patches, and secure backups.

Project: Easier Boot loader configuration for hardware adaptation and service monitoring. Description: Created boot script files for different ATCA variants (ADSP, MPPAM, SCNAM) to bring up the ATCA boards for u-boot loader. As part of this project creation of boot script files by considering of the following implementation details, 1. Support for new hardware unit more easily. 2. Support for booting board-Network Node to interfere booting other already integrated boards. E.g. Support for new board must not touch the core bootloader configuration implementation 3. Configure the boot scripts differently without Flexi Platform R&D 4. Boot firmware core configuration shall be placed to its own subsystem e.g. SS_BootLoader Responsibilities: 1. nstalled the IBM blades/hosts using opsware tool. 2. Analyzing the issues and providing the fixes. 3. Created the GRUB and PXE configuration files to bring up the self loading nodes for GRUB and PXE loaders. 4. Experience administering, installing, configuring and maintaining Linux. 5. Installs, upgrades and manages packages via RPM and YUM package management 6. Installs Firmware Upgrades, kernel patches, systems configuration, performance tuning on Unix/Linux systems. Environment: Linux, shell scripting.

Project: Flexiplatform IP Networkig Description: The Flexiplatform is a server-side platform that provides capabilities to build various network-element applications targeted towards the IP-based platform market. The purpose of this project is to develop backend support for networking SCLI command using C++. SS_IPMgmt provides the tools to add, view, modify and delete IP configuration information. The information is stored in a configuration database, currently LDAP. SS_IPMgmt only handles the configuration data, SS_NetworkManager updates the RTE based on the configuration data. Responsibilities: • Installed Linux on various ATCA variants (ADSP1, ADSP2, MPPAM and SCNAM) and also installed on BCN hardware. • Configured the machine for IPv4 and IPv6 network. • Debugging the issues and analyzing the log files and providing the fixes. • Managed systems routine backup, scheduling jobs, enabling cron jobs, enabling system logging and network logging of servers for maintenance. • Performed RPM and YUM package installations, patch and other server management. • Installed and configured Logical Volume Manager – LVM and RAID. Environment: Linux, shell scripting

Project: Linux NAS upgrade Description: The “Control Station Linux Upgrade” feature for Barossa will upgrade the Celerra Control Station to the fairly up-to-date if not the latest version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux distribution. The existing software is currently based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4, and the expected upgrade in the new software will be to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 at a minimum. This is also a transition from 32 bit to 64 bit. One of the major Barossa deliverables is an IPv6-enabled Celerra, which includes the Control Station software. The project would involve new feature development, enhancements, defect fixes. Responsibilities: • Installed the linux using kickstart installation. • Troubleshooting the issues for various enterprise linux versions for Barossa and cognac branches for Celerra product. • Configured the Control station (Celerra machine) for IPv4, IPv6 using classic installation, recovery installation, upgrade and kickstart installation. • Administrated DHCP, DNS, and NFS services in Linux. • Created and maintained user’s accounts, profiles, security, rights disk space and process monitoring. • Provided technical support by troubleshooting Day–to-Day issues with various Servers on different platforms. • Administers the VMware client 3.5 for various linux NAS releases (eg: Barossa). • Provided system support for 100+ servers of Redhat Linux including routine maintenance, patching, and system backups and restores, and software and hardware upgrades. • Worked on building new SUSE & Redhat Linux servers, support lease replacements and implementing system patches using the HP Server Automation tool. • Configuration, implementation and administration of Clustered servers on SUSE Linux environment. • Experienced in system administration, System planning, co-ordination and group level and user level management. • Expertise in creating and managing Logical Volumes in Linux.

worked as linux system administrator and devops engineer